


Inside

by Grin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blink and you'll miss it, Body Horror, Isolation, Like, Lucifer/Sam is very brief and one-sided, Psychological Horror, Season/Series 05, some horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-13 00:36:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17477951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grin/pseuds/Grin
Summary: Sam captures Lucifer weeks before their showdown in Detroit, and when he's put in close quarters with the Devil, he fights to keep himself intact.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted more season 5 interaction between Sam and Lucifer, so here it is. I've also stared at it until I'm cross-eyed, so I can't say it makes 100% sense. And it gave me an excuse to draw some fan art to use as the graphic, so there you go.
> 
> This is a short introductory chapter, but the rest is mostly written. I'll start posting the chapters two at a time once I finish and go back through for another edit.
> 
> Also, heads-up on the tags: the mature rating is because of a scene in the next chapter that is also the reason for the body horror tag, but the rest of the fic is, in my opinion, show-level angst and horror. I'm not very tag or warning savvy so if you feel there should be more of either I'll mull over any suggestions.

The air tasted staler than it had a moment ago. All those seconds before, when the air was sweeter, before the trap had snapped shut, Sam could have made it out. The power suspending him in place released him, and he lurched forward, finally reaching where he had needed to be that short eternity before, to scrabble at the small side door that led out of the warehouse. The knob still turned in his hand. His heart leapt. It wasn't locked. He threw it open. There was a room that wasn't there when he had checked the exits before, but the wall he faced had windows that were letting in sunlight and beside them, directly across from him, stood another door. In five strides he found it open. In another, he was through it and outside.

He was back where he'd started. Lucifer waved fingers at him from where he stood in the middle of the large, empty cavern of a room. The ring of holy oil that had caught him was now completely lit and burning so strongly that the fallen archangel had given ground to retreat to the center. With a feeling of unreality, Sam looked over his shoulder, back from where he had come. Past the room out of which he'd just run, through the other open door, Lucifer was facing the other away. He looked backwards towards Sam and, as he pivoted, Sam could see someone blocking light from the bright doorway on Lucifer's other side. The man's head was turned, but he could tell he was tall and solidly built, with shoulder-length dark hair.

"I wouldn't stare too long," a voice said from behind him. The Lucifer through the other door had turned back to the man in front of him. "That way lies madness."

Sam stumbled back into the bright room. He slammed the door on Lucifer and locked it. He raced to the other door, envisioning him breaking through the holy fire once he was out of his sight and pushing his way inside. But he was standing serenely with his hands clasped in front of him, watching Sam over his shoulder unblinkingly up until the door banged closed.

Sam stood with his hands braced against it as his breath wheezed out of him. He glanced everywhere, checking the room over: white. The walls, the floor, the furniture, which didn't look new. It could have been inviting, if the Devil wasn't waiting next door. He wiped a hand over his face and checked the door again to make sure it was locked. It didn't make sense to bother, but it had to hold.

The room he was in had been designed to reach a new level of blandness. He sidled between the couch and the coffee table, pacing towards the kitchen portion of the single room setup and letting his surroundings brush by him without note. His thoughts were taking their time catching up, but even in his stupefied panic, the TV attracted his attention. There was a post-it stuck to the screen, so pink its reflection radiated off the slick surface, and he pulled it off. It said, "Turn Me On ;-)".

After a minute of searching and failing to find the button, he buckled like scaffolding in a heap on the sofa. He stared at the screen for longer than that before his breath slowed and he noticed a poking in his thigh. Rooting around, he pulled out the remote from where it was hiding in between the cushions.

It turned on to a scene of the room he was in with the camera facing the couch he was sitting on. A figure walked into view wearing a chevron-printed sweater vest and khaki slacks, visible only from his calves to chest-height. He paced an indecisive path to either side of the screen and back several times before he halted and the mic picked up a sigh. Then he sat, and the archangel Gabriel's dirty-golden head sank into view.

"Sam," he said and his breath punched out of him again. Sam moved closer to the screen, waiting for some instruction he had missed or sign he hadn't followed that had stranded him here in this comfortable hell, but Gabriel wouldn't look up. He stared at his slumped form, arms hanging limply from his knees, and he felt fear moving in like a blindness. Possibilities of escape blinked out one by one.

He watched without really seeing as Gabriel ran his hand through his hair and looked up at him with a pinched expression of concern. His eyes moved minutely, like he was looking him in the face.

"Sam. I am so, so sorry," he said, and Sam hid his face in his hands, until he could block out the sight of that room and its impossible sunlight.


	2. Chapter 2

"There's no way in or out. I made it seamless." Gabriel leaned back to knock on the wall behind him with an expression of pride. His face fell quickly solemn and still. "It had to be, to keep him in here. I'm sorry you didn't make it out, kiddo. This is the best chance you're going to get to rip me a new one. So go on, speak ill of me, question my parentage. Don't hold back."

He laid his arms to his sides, baring his chest, and waved his hands in invitation. Sam hadn't shaken off his denial enough to take him up on the offer until the fourth or fifth viewing, but now he sat blankly, soaking in the image of Gabriel's down-turned face and how his hands closed but didn't fully clench. Pursing his lips, he looked up hesitantly, checking that Sam was through with his diatribe, before he loosed a sharp, appreciative whistle and pulled on a sheepish smirk. Sam forgot sometimes that he was dead and this was a recording.

"How long have you been sitting on that one? The bit about the armadillo, and what the leprosy would rot off first? Bestiality's not really in my wheelhouse, but I'm using that." The last crack had been about a donkey show in Bethlehem that Sam had fast-forwarded through with one eye closed. The line changed each time, but then Gabriel would always sober up and lean forward with his hands clasped in front of him. "You're stuck. But you're not stuck with him." Gabriel pointed at where the doors were relative to Sam, and not where they would be from where he was sitting. "They're locked up with more than deadbolts, so he can't get through them, especially if you've got him Johnny Cashed. So sit tight. Maybe I've painted your situation a little too bleak, but you've surprised me before. And it wouldn't be the first time Castiel's tripped into one of my loops, maybe--"

Sam shut the TV off, and stood up. He knew the rest.

The view outside the windows wasn't clear, but he'd tried and couldn't wipe the glass clean enough to see through it. It was frosted, or the outside was coated with grime, or the glass was separated from the world by a zero-width inter-dimensional barrier and his eyes weren't designed to make sense of it. Or Gabriel was bullshitting. Though after the window wouldn't open, he had tried to put a kitchen chair through it and only one was still standing, which was convincing.

He could still see masses of light sky and dark ground, broken by almost shadows of people walking by, as vague as someone else's dream. Squinting didn't give anything definition, and he banged his fist on the pane just to hear it rattle. He'd quit screaming to get passersby's attention a half an hour ago when he thought he'd heard laughter. Not from the window, which the wind couldn't squeeze through. Whatever Gabriel did to reinforce the doors was apparently only supposed to keep Lucifer out, and not his taunting.

He had told Dean he was coming here, to the last place they had seen Gabriel before his standoff with Lucifer in the Elysian Hotel, to see if he had left any other clues besides the original video about the Horsemen's rings behind. Castiel hadn't bought it, but he'd occupied Dean while Sam had slipped out on his own, accepting that he knew what he was doing. Cas should have put his faith to better use.

The idea had been that seeing Sam alone would have been irresistible to Lucifer. It was closing in on the six month deadline for his consent and he must have expected his vessel to get in touch with him. And he had proven that by appearing like lightning striking right on target inside the waiting circle of holy oil when Sam had prayed to him. He hadn't moved while Sam had lit the match and run. It had all gone off like it was meant to be, which is why he should have known he wouldn't make it out. Fate was on Lucifer's side. Warded doors and a circle of holy fire between them, and Sam thought of himself as the only captive here.

But that meant that Dean and Cas were out there. Sam sprawled on the sofa and checked his phone again. Every time he looked, his messages

_I'm okay I'm stuck but I'm okay I'm looking for a way out dont leave without cas_

_I fucked up_

_I'm sorry_

sat unread, marked to warn him that they hadn't gone through. He tapped send again anyway and threw it back on the table.

The time on his phone read a quarter after nine in the evening, but the sun hadn't set. This room could be in a different hemisphere from the warehouse, if it had a physical location in the world at all. Gabriel hadn't been confined by what was possible. It seemed like he'd preferred to work outside of it. When Dean started missing him and tracked him down to the warehouse, there may be nothing there to find.

Sam's fingers followed the lines of his anti-possession tattoo by rote while he cataloged the wards on his body that he couldn't see. This wasn't the first time he'd weighed the pros and cons of being cloaked from celestial eyes, but it hadn't betrayed him like this before. Lucifer, the reason he had been warded, knew where he was, and if anyone could have pinpointed where to find him, Gabriel wasn't wrong, Castiel could have done it. If Sam wasn't untraceable.

They wouldn't let that keep them from him, though. And Sam had only started finding his way out.

He rearranged himself on the couch. It was the first one he'd lain on that was long and wide enough to hold him, but he couldn't enjoy it. Gabriel had been thinking of him when he'd picked it. He'd known he'd had Sam from the first puppy-dog look of entreaty he'd given him. They'd all memorized the message from the video that they had watched together, but when Sam had re-watched it alone, the camera had started up again with Gabriel sitting in the same place with that look, saying his name.

"Sam."

His head jerked up. He stared at the door he could see and listened until his neck ached from the strain of holding still.

"Sam." It was drawn out in a long, reverberating sing-song note, and it was coming clearly from the next room. The doors sounded a lot thinner than he'd thought they were.

He rolled onto his feet in a crouch and straightened as he approached. He hadn't opened either door a crack since he had shut them, but after turning the place upside-down, they were becoming his most likely means of escape, whatever Gabriel had said about his odds. Except he hadn't gotten near enough to investigate. The air around them smelled like smoke, and he imagined the wood about to burst into sudden, violent conflagration, but the rational reason was that doors were better barriers if they stayed closed.

The door fit well in the frame, but there was a throw on the couch that he could use to clog the gaps and deaden the noise.

"Just open the door, Sam. Let's talk."

Sam yanked his hand back from the door. He shoved his fear aside and went back to rip the throw from the couch.

"If you open the door, I promise, I'll be quiet."

He snatched one door open a few inches, enough to fling the blanket around it before shoving it closed again a second later. He took the slack and stuffed as much as he could in the cracks.

He could hear laughter.

In a fervor, he pulled the knife strapped inside his boot and began slashing through the excess, spraying stuffing on the carpet. The ragged cuts went through the fabric, but he was making a poor job of it. There wouldn't be enough he could use. His next option was behind door number three. Gabriel had shown some foresight and installed a bathroom, and the shower had a curtain. He stripped it off the rod and rushed back to the door he hadn't covered. He grabbed the knob and his hand slipped turning it. He stiffened his grip. He was making himself into a joke by ducking behind doors and under blankets. He hadn't done that as a child, and he wouldn't now.

He opened the door until he could see Lucifer standing in the midst of the flames and rising above them. They looked like a poor prison for an archangel. Sam swept the shower curtain over the door in full view and took his time securing it and testing the fit. Rustling was the only sound from either side besides the snapping of the fire. When he was done, he looked up. It was eerie to see Lucifer staring at him, because he'd known he was watching but he hadn't felt it. There was a weight that was absent. He looked human and made the right motions, but the man they belonged to wasn't there. Sam's skin heaved against his bones at the violation, but he didn't look away as he shut the door. Neither did Lucifer, who wasn't laughing anymore.

With the door closed, he could leave without fleeing, and he walked until he was as far away as he could get in the tiny apartment. He gripped the edge of the kitchen counter for balance and stared down into the sink. Lucifer hadn't moved from the circle, and he would have if he'd had the chance. If he hadn't moved, it was because he couldn't. He wouldn't come any closer to Sam than he had just been. He ran water into his cupped hands to splash on his face, then did some more thorough snooping through the kitchen.

The fridge and pantry were stocked, and he felt a little less alone sending a prayer of thanks up to Gabriel. For being dead, he was gaining a larger presence in his life than he'd had when he was alive. Making food let him slow back down. Time he spent stirring and chopping wasn't spent glancing at the other side of the room, and for a few minutes he lost himself in enjoying it, even if he didn't have the appetite to eat when he was done.

It hadn't gotten any earlier, meanwhile, and he could hold off on a late dinner, which would keep in the fridge for now, but he needed to sleep. He fussed around with the couch, and it folded out into a bed after some rough coaxing. He ignored its protests and laid back with a few smacks to put the couch cushion he was using as a pillow in its place. The temperature was comfortable enough that he didn't miss the blanket. He shut his eyes and put an arm across his face to block out the sunlight. He focused on the heaviness of it pressing against his eyes, and of the rest of him settling down into the mattress. What was external pushed inside him, and his thoughts and worries were less real for a moment.

Until he couldn't keep his mind off the doors. The room was smaller with his eyes closed, and he could feel them pressing in on him. If he reached out an arm he could touch the rough hewn surface and find where he knew the knob would be, because its cold ached in his bones and swelled between them. He waited for it to warm in his grip, but he was starting to shiver.

His hand hadn't moved, but the knob was turning.

Sam startled awake, and he fell forward and caught himself. He was standing. The sheets were rumpled and stiff behind him in the empty bed, and he was leaning against a door. He grabbed the knob to shake it. It was locked. He put those observations into every order his disoriented mind could shuffle them and, when he found one that fit, he slammed his hand against the door.

"Stay out of my head!" he shouted. He stopped battering the door long enough to listen for a reply. Nothing. The blows resumed. "Hey! Hey, I know you hear me." Then he remembered the soundproofing and stepped back to make fists in his hair instead of bloodying them against the walls.

He eyed the shoddy work he had done, with the burst seams of the blanket sticking out haphazardly from around the door like it was holding back a tide of cotton. Lucifer could hear him through that, and he was deciding not to answer.

Or he couldn't hear him because he was gone. Gabriel couldn't kill Lucifer; maybe he wasn't powerful enough to imprison him. Sam watched the door, and it followed him as he walked back to bed. He wasn't gone, or Sam would be asleep; he wouldn't be here. He perched on the edge of the mattress and kneaded his face in his hands to get the blood flowing. It was morning. Two in the morning, but the unrelenting daylight was still burning. It wasn't the dawning of a new day that made his handling of his situation last night ridiculous to him now. Sleep may have given him some perspective, but he wasn't getting any more. He looked regretfully at his pillow, sighed and hauled himself back to his feet.

He pulled at the fabric wedged around the door, picking loose pieces to let them fall onto the carpet. The doors hadn't been much protection so far, if Lucifer could get into his head while he slept. He wouldn't be at any greater risk with them open than if he left them shut and resigned himself to sitting in here with his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed and made sure that he would never find a chance to leave.

And Lucifer could have already found it. That made him pause after he clicked the lock open. He pulled the door, and he let out a breath that didn't feel as good as relief when he saw that Lucifer hadn't moved.

"Sam," he greeted. Sam stood in the doorway and said nothing. He turned an ear towards him like he was actively listening, and Sam marshaled his thoughts and refused to look directly at him. "You're here."

"Like I had a choice. What do you want?" Sam asked. Lucifer was going beyond the question while picking an answer.

"Company," he ultimately said and smiled at Sam's disgust. "But when I pictured us meeting again face-to-face, this wasn't where I had in mind." He looked along the walls and back to Sam, to see him doing the same. There weren't any other doors besides the one in front of him and the one behind Lucifer, and exploring the rest of the room for weaknesses in the structure meant he'd have to go in further than the doorway.

"You certainly knew what you were doing, though. Captured a lot of archangels lately?" Lucifer crossed his arms and played at being good-natured about his predicament. Sam ignored him and took a decisive step inside. The fire wouldn't let Lucifer do anything more than give him bad dreams, at least in theory. He kicked the blanket up against the foot of the door to hold it open. His gaze roved around the room, skipping over Lucifer like a well-known hazard, as he walked along the perimeter, shaking the uneven slatted boards to see if they would give way. Light was sifting in from gaps in the ceiling, and the quality of it told Sam it was evening outside, though the doorway he had propped open was still brimming with noonday sunlight. He inspected the walls again with an eye for handholds that he might use to reach them.

"You won't get out that way." Sam stopped testing his weight on the boards to wipe sweat from his brow. He grabbed another board nearby. "Gabriel put more thought into this than he usually does." Sam turned halfway towards him. Lucifer had mentioned his brother's name casually, like murdering him had been of no consequence. He hadn't expected that, even from the Devil.

"So don't be too hard on yourself," Lucifer said like Sam hadn't refused to join the conversation. "Accepting his help usually ends in disappointment."

"He's dead because of you," Sam spat at the lack of respect. Lucifer raised his brows at the strong reaction.

"He's not," he said. "But he'd get a kick out of you playing the hysterical widow."

He breathed in his angry words and they burned down his throat. Lies or delusions, he wasn't going to give Lucifer any legitimacy by addressing them.

"He wasn't the one who made sure I couldn't leave," Sam accused and turned fully towards him, but he didn't get any closer to the flames.

"I'm not mad," Lucifer assured him. "I won't try to get even." Sam eyed the flames dubiously.

"Oh, those," Lucifer said after he followed Sam's gaze, like he hadn't noticed them until now. He waved a hand over them slowly like he was warming his palm. "Going the extra mile. You really don't like me, do you?" With his attention on Sam, he stuck his hand into the fire.

The flesh blistered. Swelling skin burst and then shriveled while fluid dripped, hissing, into the open flame. But what made Sam choke down his lunch was the smell of cooking, the greasy fat that coated his tongue when he opened his mouth to breathe. Fingers curled like a spider's legs and their tendons shrunk, leaving the charred skeletal structure bare and small, delicate and alien. Lucifer turned the hand over, watching his vessel's skin blacken and flake with a vacant interest, like Sam would watch a pig roast.

"Not a fan of fire, either?" Lucifer asked. He pulled the limb from the flames and flexed his fingers, and it was whole again. Nothing of the horror he'd witnessed, except he was still breathing it in. Sam hocked until he could spit on the floor. His insides were roiling and his mouth was watering, and he needed to get Lucifer's taste out of the back of his throat before he vomited.

"I don't hate you, despite what you are," Lucifer said as he rubbed his thumb against the tips of his new fingers. The look on his face was bright with an endless compassion that wanted to engulf him. Sam walked away towards the open door on shaking legs. "We're going to be together for a long time. And that time won't be very pleasant if all you can do is hate me." He groped for the knob and kicked the blanket towards the living room.

"Sleep on it," Lucifer implored and he shut the door.

His feet caught in the blanket and he fell on his knees, heaving and struggling to keep the carpet clean. He swallowed and pushed himself a few staggering steps towards the bathroom. His ears rung with the perfect pitch of the fire spitting where Lucifer had spilled into it. Fat was hot as melted wax where it dripped, he had felt it. He closed his eyes to stop himself from looking up, because he knew who he would see. The pain in his shin after he rammed it into the coffee table brought some clarity. His nausea passed.

The tears didn't fall until he leaned over the sink, his head meeting the mirror with a fragile sound. His hair pulled from the friction as his arms quit holding him and skidded across the laminated counter. On his knees, he pressed his brow into its hard edge and he resented his ugly, tearing breaths.

His head fit into the corner against the wall where it met the counter, which was cool against his throbbing temple. His cheeks were already drying, but he didn't feel settled. He was thinking of Jess, beautiful, sensitive Jess, splayed across their bed, laughing. She'd always accepted what little he gave her like it was more than enough. He was convinced sometimes that she knew everything that he was hiding and was allowing him to tell her in his own time. He tried to remember her saying grace over late night fast food or picking apart his essays or kissing him, but he couldn't think of her long before her laughter turned to screams. He scrubbed his swollen eyes with the tips of his fingers. He hadn't cried for her in years, but that chapter of his life hadn't closed, even with Azazel dead. That door rattled on its hinges and banged loud enough to still wake him up at night. He'd come to terms with it. He'd shoved their life together aside like it hadn't happened and in return her death didn't make his life unlivable.

Then here was Lucifer, who had always been the wind laughing through the cracks. He had been the voice whispering in Azazel's ear and giving him his orders. It had hit him, with Lucifer's little demonstration, just how destructive a force he'd been in his life without ever touching him. Sam needed to take back control. If he couldn't get out, he had to end this fear that Lucifer wasn't as powerless as he seemed.

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the interlocking rings of the Four Horsemen. He rolled the configuration back and forth between his fingers and mouthed the words to open the Cage, careful not to intone them. They were part of the plan to send Lucifer back to his prison once he was trapped, but Gabriel had explicitly warned him against using them now that he was also inside. He'd made graphic allusions to punching holes in pressurized tanks and what would happen, in excessive detail, to his fragile human body when the air caught fire.

He would do it anyway, if he knew he could take Lucifer out with him. It was Gabriel's reluctant admission that he wasn't really sure what would happen that had Sam putting the rings back in his pocket. A chance at getting out wasn't worth letting Lucifer go free.

Standing up again was arduous, like he'd been steeping in deep water. He stepped out of the bathroom and he first looked towards the doors, before he heard Gabriel's voice from behind him.

"He knows how to get to people, Sam, and he's doing it to you. Admitting it is the first step," he said and Sam stared at the screen with the certainty that he'd turned it off earlier. Slowly, he walked around the TV so that he was facing Gabriel, who was seated and looking up at him, not the camera. Sam had watched the video front to back and this hadn't been anywhere in it. "He got on God's nerves big time and then pissed off most of everyone in existence, but, hey, I didn't let him bring me down. Not all the way, anyway." Lucifer had been scornful when Sam had mentioned Gabriel's death. Sam swallowed when he took another step to the side and the archangel's eyes followed him.

"Where are you?" Sam asked with a sense of leaning too far over empty air, with not enough faith to make the leap. He startled when Gabriel cupped a hand to his ear.

"Come again?"

"Are you really--there?" Sam rasped, though he couldn't make himself speak any louder while he thought of Lucifer listening in the next room.

"Do I think Cas has a nice derriere? He's my brother," he said reproachfully. "Of course he does."

"Gabriel--" Sam said through an involuntary laugh.

"I can't hear you, Sam," he said and his ever-present grin faltered. "I can just pretend. That's what I'm--was good at." Sam gritted his teeth in a pained smile and wiped at his eyes as they watered again. He was desperate, to fall for such a low trick. A sharp clap caught his attention.

"None of that," Gabriel said sternly with his hands still pressed together. "Now that I've got you distracted, I'm going to show you how we manage our anger. Think of something that makes you happy, and only happy. Then breathe in." With his eyes screwed shut, Gabriel snorted in air like it was practiced, but not for breathing. "And out." He followed his own instructions for a minute while Sam stared on impassively, until he curled his fingers between each other. His head against his clasped hands, he started muttering. "Yeah, take that, Luci. And that." Sam shook his head and searched for the remote.

"Now this is one that Kali taught me." He knew he had left it on the coffee table, but he didn't find it until he was folding the bed back into the couch, where it had stuck itself between the mattress and frame. Sam caught an eyeful of Gabriel contorting himself on the couch with enthusiastic grunts before he cut it off and dropped the remote back on the table.

He retrieved the food from the fridge and ate it cold from the container without much enthusiasm, but he didn't want to wait for his hunger to add to his misery. He chewed methodically and swallowed, while his eyes kept returning to the knife that he had left dripping dry in the dish drainer.

 

 

 

  
Lucifer cocked an eyebrow at him when he walked back into the room. "That was quick." Sam faced the wall without acknowledgment. "What have you got there?"

"You said we're going to be here for a while," he said and brandished the paintbrush he'd grabbed from the cabinet under the sink out to the side for Lucifer to see. He dipped it in the bucket of paint that had come with it and continued working. "So I thought I'd keep myself busy and redecorate." He finished and moved a few feet further along the wall to start again when Lucifer spoke.

"Was the pink your choice?"

Sam's grin widened until the corners of his mouth hurt. What paint was left in the bucket had been white originally. Undiluted blood would have been more potent, but mixing it with paint was a compromise between coverage and bleeding himself dry. He checked the bandage on his hand for any spotting and took his time finishing the sigil. He had a lot more room to cover.

"Whatever makes you feel safe, Sam," Lucifer said and Sam scowled. He hastily scraped the bristles of the brush across the rim of the can and some of the excess sprayed in a fine mist of droplets against the wall.

This was his first time completely warding a space this large. He knew there was some interplay that happened between certain sigils, and that he could muck it up enough to render it all useless if he didn't plan it right. It only gave him a new respect for how daunting Gabriel's task had been, to create what amounted to a Cage on Earth. Sam was finger painting all over a masterpiece, in the hope that his own blood, as Lucifer's vessel, would tie it all that much more tightly together. It did make him feel safer, to see the same protections he'd repeatedly trusted his life to standing vigil on the walls. Of course Lucifer had to cheapen it.

He looked over his shoulder self-assuredly when he reached the corner, to measure the distance to the next sigil, but his eyes went straight to the flames. Something had changed. The fire brightened and dimmed as his heart beat, leaving dark tracks where the writhing light burned holes in his vision, until he found Lucifer a second later. He was still there, in the center of the circle, but he was sitting in a plain, wooden chair, from which he watched him squirm at his leisure. Sam studied the chair like a demon had appeared in front of him. It meant the same--Lucifer was testing his boundaries. Sam forced himself to turn away, and he retraced the part of the sigil he'd already finished. He didn't trust his hands to paint a steady line. Sweat pooled at the nape of his neck. He shouldn't have come in here.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Lucifer's rough voice intimated, and the words hit Sam in the back like darts. That was still the worst he could do: talk. He slowly relaxed and moved on to the next ward. "Instead of coming up with new ways to keep me in here, you could put this out and we could just--go."

Sam dropped the paintbrush in the bucket and used the collar of his shirt to wipe his forehead.

"Chalk it up to experience. Better luck next time."

He stared down into the can as he felt sweat already springing to his face. The flames gave off a lot more heat than he had expected. A drop rolled from his hairline down his nose and into the paint. He grabbed the brush handle and swished it around until the bristles were coated before clanging it against the sides of the can.

"Staying here won't change what happens next," Lucifer said.

"And what happens next?" Sam asked with a slash of the brush against the wall. He tried to interpret Lucifer's silence.

"I'm not trying to make you mad, Sam."

"Yeah, you don't want me to be mad at you. You don't want me to hate you. Save it," he bit out.

Another sigil done, and Sam stopped to roll his sleeves down. His sweat was chilling on his skin.

"Drop the righteous anger," Lucifer said. He was leaning forward with his arms on his knees and his hands splayed against each other. The firelight carved shadows from his severe features. Sam's knuckles were white around the handle of the paint bucket, but he otherwise didn't move as he stared the Devil down.

Lucifer was the first to look away.

"I understand--" he started, and moved his jaw like he was trying to dislodge what he was about to say, "the need to be in control. But do I look like I'm going anywhere?" He sat back and raised his hands in supplication.

"You talked a big game about getting us out of here."

"If you're this set on staying, neither of us will be getting out." He crossed one leg over the other. "We'll just have to let the Apocalypse sort itself out, huh? The only thing we'll be fighting is boredom."

The rest of the wall stretched out in front of his aching eyes. He could barely see the next corner in the low light, because he hadn't even filled half of it.

He'd only been at it for an hour. He pocketed his phone again and rubbed his eyes. He'd been told he was stubborn by enough hard-heads to know most of why he was scrawling wards on the walls with his back to Lucifer, but pure obstinance wasn't going to carry him any farther. Without glancing anywhere but in front of him, he made his way towards the open door, but he couldn't leave without turning back.

"Stay out of my head," Sam said. He wanted to see what he'd say to that.

Lucifer looked at him with his arms folded, and his lips parted with a purpose. The lines around his eyes spread as they narrowed, and he pressed his mouth shut. He gave Sam a slow, deliberate nod.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam shut the door and quickly painted another ward on the back of it and did the same to the door behind him. That should keep Lucifer out of his head, if he changed his mind.

Lucifer had crawled inside him in other ways. He clanged the can down on the coffee table and looked for the lid that he'd left on the kitchen counter so the paint wouldn't dry. He laid out on the couch without converting it into a bed, and like every time he tried to get sleep, it sensed his desperation and left him alone.

Except he wasn't alone. Not since Lucifer had been released--since he had released Lucifer. He didn't know why he had been so sure that he would be sleeping by himself last night, when he'd been sharing his dreams across miles and time zones for nearly six months.

He hadn't met Lucifer before now, except that didn't seem true. He had glimpsed him at Carthage and in the Elysian, but both times had been too frantic for him to consider them met. That didn't mean they hadn't gotten to know each other. Lucifer had come back after that first nightmare together with him in bed and had admitted it had been in bad taste. He'd told Sam how difficult it was to hold himself back when they were so close, and Sam had shuddered when he'd touched him and he had picked at his skin to wake himself up. When he had started bleeding and he was still there, he hadn't known if he could get out. Lucifer had smeared his thumb through the blood and Sam had thought horribly that he would bring it to his mouth before he'd moved his hand to his forehead and Sam had woke up. He had still been bleeding.

Sam closed his eyes tighter and tried to fill his head with anything besides Lucifer's litany of calm assurances and his own denials. Except that the nights when he had been on his own, he had regretted it. He didn't know what he saw then, but the closest he came to an answer was that Lucifer had been inside him, and Lucifer had been in Hell, and what he saw was what bled through. He choked awake with the familiar taste of blood in his mouth and the muscle memory of sinking down and suffocating in a warm, thick river. He saw light so unreally bright that when he opened his eyes to escape it, he would lie in bed half-blinded for an hour after. Something with sharp fingers scrabbled and scratched at his back while it tried to get away, and he couldn't turn around or move until sensation returned to his body and ants stopped tunneling through his limbs.

He had killed again. Sometimes he relived the toe-curling ecstasy of Lilith dying at his feet. But it was Madison who slumped to the floor, her life bubbling out of a black bullet wound while he held the gun in his outstretched hand. Then his face was wet, and someone screamed as they were torn apart, and then he was drenched. He always felt that same joy. He felt it even as he carved himself up and parts of him fell away. He laughed while he chopped, and then long after he'd cut out his throat, when the hand holding the blade started to work its way piece by piece down his arm.

Sam jerked awake and scrabbled for the back of the couch to catch himself.

Slowly, he pried his fingers loose and laid back. He put one hand to his clammy forehead as his chest heaved and his breath shook in time to his heart thumping against his lungs.

When he could open his eyes, he thought that he had overslept, before he adjusted once again to the perpetual daylight. He stared at the window as long as he could without blinking, like the light streaming in could wash the inside of his head clean.

He hadn't dreamt like this before Lucifer. Maybe he would never sleep through the night again. He groped for his phone and found where it had fallen out of his pocket and onto the floor. He clicked the button to wake it up. He clicked it again when it stayed dark.

He tossed it on the table and breathed deeply to calm himself. That was his last connection to the outside world severed.

He made the rounds of the apartment again, digging through cabinets and upending drawers, but no phone charger. His phone hadn't really been any use to him except to mark time. Knowing how long he'd been here wouldn't help him. He walked in a circle, sifting through the mess around him again by sight. Gabriel could stock the place with food and amenities, and he could lock it down so even light could not escape, but he couldn't give him this one little peace of mind. He clasped his hands behind his neck and stared ahead while his mind went blank. He didn't know what to do. The TV was dark and had no answer for him, and he had a vicious thought of stripping its power cord and rigging his own charger.

He picked up the scissors and dropped them into an open drawer. He couldn't lose Gabriel, too.

He'd put a few other items back in place before he looked at all the work he'd made for himself and decided to leave it for later. His hair was greasy when he ran his fingers through it. A shower would fix that, but he didn't know what to do about his clothes. Putting them back on dirty sounded as appealing as washing them in the shower and walking around naked and exposed while they dried. Then he moved the towels aside in the bathroom cabinet.

He didn't immediately believe what he was seeing, but he pulled out what was sure enough a blue flannel shirt from the top of a stack of clothing. He didn't want to guess how Gabriel knew his size, and for all of his clothes. Grateful but unsettled, he decided to forgive him for the charger and let the specifics go unquestioned.

Showering without a curtain was novel, but at least there was room to hang his clothes to dry. It was no substitute for a washer and dryer, or even laundry detergent, but he felt better for having done it.

He could walk into Lucifer's room, paint in hand.

"Look at you," Lucifer said after letting out a whistle. He was standing near the flames, holding his hands out like he was warming them over a campfire. He rubbed them briskly together. The chair was gone. "What did Gabriel do, build you a bunker? Have you been holding out on me?"

Sam clenched his free hand before he could pick self-consciously at his clothes. He should continue painting the wards, but he'd have to look away from Lucifer first.

"You look rested," he continued without expecting an answer to his last question. "Sleep well?"

Sam fidgeted with the paint bucket. He looked up at the holes in the ceiling and saw daylight.

"How long was I out?" Sam asked.

"Six long hours," Lucifer supplied. "It's about noon, noon-thirty, Eastern Daylight Time."

Sam gave him a wary look to disguise his overwhelming relief. He plodded over to his unfinished business on the adjoining wall.

"Did you have good dreams?" Lucifer asked and continued at Sam's sour look. "Since I wouldn't know, because I haven't been anywhere near them."

"No comment," Sam said. The paint was thicker today, and he was wondering if he needed to dilute it with more blood. Maybe he should refrigerate it to keep it from curdling. He adjusted the fresh bandage on his hand and started a new sigil.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lucifer sucked his lower lip into his mouth and let it out in a sigh.

"Well, where did we leave off last time?" Lucifer asked and Sam had to pause mid-stroke to consider what he was talking about.

"You wanted to know what happens next. You've asked that before."

He didn't remember that, but Lucifer turned everything to his own purpose. He tried to loosen his fingers around the brush of the handle. The curve of the sigil was straightening out.

"I also asked you a question, and soon I'll need an answer."

Sam focused on blocking out the sound of his voice.

"Being my vessel may take some--adjustment, at first. But you were created to hold me. You'll see that. And I'll be gentle, Sam. We'll take it slow. There won't be any reason to rush, when we're together."

All he heard was his own breathing, in and out.

"I am out of practice. I've been pushing this vessel a little too hard. But you and me, we'll be different."

In and out.

"Talk to me, Sam. I actually do get tired of listening to my own voice," he said lightly.

"Then stop talking," Sam snapped.

The light dimmed enough that Sam whipped around to make sure the flames were still lit. They flailed fitfully but stayed upright. Lucifer had his head tilted back so that the light didn't reach his face. His eyes were fathomless.

They were still on opposite sides of the fire. Sam leaned back against the wall while Lucifer watched him, his expression abstracted by the unsteady flames.

"No, Lucifer," Sam said. "How many times do I have to say it?"

He stepped closer to the circle.

"Until you don't," Lucifer said in a controlled voice.

"I won't say it."

"Why are you telling me?" Lucifer asked. Sam felt the heat of the flames in front of him. The air was ice cold behind him. He could see the angel's eyes now, almost colorless in the dark.

"I was too impatient with you," he said with regret as he looked Sam over. "The demon blood was just a quick fix, so you'd be ready for me as soon as I needed you. I should have done it myself."

"What?" Sam asked, even though he was sure he didn't want to know. "Done what?"

"Given you my blood." He touched his face and Sam took a step back when he realized there was darkness oozing from the sores at his temple. "And my grace. That's what this is, Sam, an exchange."

"I don't want anything from you," Sam said with another step backwards.

"You want a way out," Lucifer said quietly. Sam opened his mouth to protest but Lucifer swept it aside with a shake of his head. "And not just out of here. Out of your life."

"Yeah, so I can be your meat suit," Sam said flippantly as he turned away. Lucifer grimaced.

"Of course you'd make it into something ugly," he said. "It's natural, Sam, for me to be curious about what it's like to be flesh. I know you wonder what it's like to be me."

Sam did, and he thought it was lonely and cold. He thought it was a lot like those awful dreams, except constant, since Lucifer never slept.

"You won't have to for long," Lucifer said, and following so closely to his thoughts, it sounded like a threat, but he seemed content to let him wonder for now. Sam didn't say anything but went back to painting.

When he reached the corner, he took another break to stretch and to massage his cramped fingers. He'd made a lot of headway, and the blank walls that remained weren't as daunting when he saw the sigils lined up beside him, reinforcing the walls from where he stood to the door. He squinted up at the ceiling. The sun was still overhead.

"It's two-twenty-seven," Lucifer chimed. Sam glanced back at him, unnerved. He'd had more success ignoring him than he'd thought. He looked at his watch in his phone's absence for verification. Except he didn't have a watch. "You're welcome." Sam let out a bitter laugh and wiped his face. He caught a flash of white on his skin, and saw that he'd inadvertently painted himself.

"You missed a spot," Lucifer called, and Sam debated whether to give him any more attention. He nodded towards the wall at Sam's look, and after a second, he found a sigil that had been partially wiped away. The missing portion matched the smear on his arm.

Sam stared at Lucifer.

"You would have figured it out," Lucifer assured him with a smile. "I just have a little more perspective."

"Keep it to yourself," Sam muttered and walked out of the room without fixing the paint.

He scrubbed his arms and hands clean and lamented the dots of paint on his new clothes. He'd have to be more careful, since Gabriel had only made room for one other pair.

The cut he'd made on his hand wasn't infected. He winced at the idea of reopening it, but that could be put off for now. He cleaned it again with the first-aid kit he'd been using from beneath the sink and changed the bandage.

He watched the video for the warning that Gabriel had given him about Lucifer while he picked up the mess he'd made in his earlier search. This time the joke was a limerick about a wife-beater who'd gone into work and had crawled back out after every woman he'd met had attacked him on sight. Sam fast-forwarded through Gabriel taking credit for that little bit of poetry and the rest of the video, but when it ended, he hadn't found anything that wasn't there before.


	4. Chapter 4

He went back into the room, unsure of how late it was, but Lucifer didn't offer and he didn't ask. Lucifer didn't say anything until Sam was deep in concentration.

"What?" Sam asked absentmindedly.

"Oh, I was just admiring you," Lucifer said, and Sam shuddered. "You don't like that."

"No."

Lucifer shrugged.

"You're headstrong, you're dedicated, there's no shame in that. When you tell yourself you can't be proud, whose voice do you hear? Is it Dean's?"

Sam laughed once, and then he couldn't help himself. He didn't expect Lucifer to grin with him. That cut his mirth short.

"Are you kidding?" Sam asked.

"It's funny," he said through the same smile. "An oldie but a goodie. You're the starry-eyed little brother. He's every older brother that's ever lived. Jealous, spiteful." Sam mocked him with a flash of teeth. Lucifer wasn't goaded and his gaze stayed steady. "Afraid, of what their little brothers will become." Sam's grin faltered. "Of their potential. And Dean has every reason to fear you. You're already more than he'd ever dread to be."

"Then I've fallen pretty damn far."

"Fallen? You've reached the sun, Sam. You have wings, not wax and feathers," Lucifer said while he paced the barrier, back and forth, his eyes pinned to Sam, standing motionless at the wall.

"I'm not you," Sam had painted up to the door that he usually didn't touch. In his haste to leave, he'd forgotten he kept it locked. He turned on Lucifer. "I don't care about your reasons or whatever grudges you're projecting. I don't want anything to do with you." Sam looked past Lucifer, searching for the light out of the dark, but the other door was closed. He couldn't recall closing it.

"There's not a lot left of worth in this shit stain of a world, but you are singularly beautiful, Sam." Sam tried to look away, but it was like Lucifer's eyes were everywhere. "And those flies out there would follow you anywhere, if you let them."

"But go on. You can try to stay away," he told him with a wave at the door and Sam had to hold himself from bolting for it. He didn't glance back when he found it open and slipped through.

He paced the floor, paint still in hand. There wasn't enough room. He needed to run and escape himself for a while. He didn't want to listen to Lucifer praise him and gloat like Sam was his when he did as he was told. He slammed his fist against the window and let his breath fog the glass.

Warding the room was a waste. He was making himself busy to distract from the fact that he couldn't leave, and the only thought that was worse was that he had to stay.

"Fuck you," he snarled at Lucifer and Gabriel and God.

"Fuck," he whimpered and slid down the wall. He couldn't sit still. He knew that he was at his weakest when he was waiting, passing time with nothing to do. He had to move and stay occupied.

He grabbed the paint can from the floor and returned to the kitchen. He didn't bite back the yell as he cut along the same line in his palm and let the sharp pain think for him. Blood dripped into the paint. So much more of the blood he had seen throughout his life should have been his and not Jessica's, or Dean's, or Mom's, or Dad's, or anyone else's. If he could trade his blood here for someone else's, whose Lucifer couldn't spill, he would.

The door was still ajar, because he hadn't left because of Lucifer, and he wanted him to know that. He hadn't planned to hesitate before going in. He didn't want to speak to Lucifer more than he had to. Talking to him was just practice in not giving him the answer he wanted, and he preferred to hold off on even the avoiding of it entirely. One word he couldn't say, but it was the only one he could think sometimes. But the rest he could use. He had to.

"What time is it?" Sam asked as he strode inside, his freshly bandaged hand stiff around the brush.

"Five-ish. Six," Lucifer said vaguely with his legs propped up on the arm of that same wooden chair and his back leaned against the other. It looked wretchedly uncomfortable, but he contorted himself to watch Sam's progress without trouble. "What changed your mind?"

"It wasn't you," Sam said. "Just like you haven't changed my mind every night you've been shitting all over my autonomy."

"One, I don't shit," Lucifer complained and sat up in his chair. "Two, your dreams are metaphysical Switzerland. I couldn't act on anything we talked about when I didn't know where you were."

"What if I don't like having my mind invaded, and I tell you to back off?" Sam asked and Lucifer looked like he enjoyed their back and forth less now. "What does that mean for your peace talks?"

"You did, Sam, and I have."

Sam bore down ruthlessly on the paintbrush. The paint was darker now, almost blending in to the aged grey wood of the wall.

"So what's going to happen, Lucifer, is you're going to listen to me. You and Michael are going to figure out how to stitch up the Apocalypse without killing each other or anyone else, and you're going to do it without trying me and Dean on for size. You with me so far?" he asked.

Lucifer gave an acknowledging hum, and Sam could tell when he was being humored. His blood boiled.

"Yeah, I know, it's fucking hilarious. Like when you say we're destined for each other." It actually made him sick, but there were times that he found a dark humor in it, like now.

"I laughed, too, when I first found out about you. Nothing like a deep, dark hole and an eternity to help you come to term with life's little absurdities," Lucifer said. Maybe the chair wasn't ordinary. It looked polished, almost burnished, by the flames glinting off its surface. It looked taller, and so did Lucifer, and Sam was very conscious that while the fire kept Lucifer in, it also kept Sam out of reach.

"But it's good to let these things out. And since we're breaking down barriers, what's holding you back?" He slouched forward in his seat. He had a lot invested in the answer.

"Are you seeing something different here?" Sam asked as he added another sigil to hold the both of them in.

"We put our heads together and--well, let's just say there's not much now that keeps me from doing what I want."

"I'm listening."

Lucifer laughed in his throat, behind his smile.

"You're lucky you're cute, Sam," he said indulgently.

"Maybe you should bite your silver tongue, Lucifer," Sam said, mimicking the way Lucifer emphasized his name. "It's not doing you any good." He didn't expect him to laugh louder.

Lucifer wiped away an imaginary tear.

"You've had to have had that one on the shelf for a while," he said and turned his head like he was having difficulty schooling his expression. "I'm enjoying this, how about you?"

Sam sneered. Lucifer propped his jaw in the crook of his hand and looked at him like he was mapping him, inside and out. Sam painted and tried to keep his shoulders straight. He was making good progress, if Lucifer would stop distracting him.

"I want to touch you," Lucifer said and Sam made the mistake of thinking he'd misheard and he looked at him. He smiled shyly and rubbed a hand down the back of his neck. Sam would have rather had a snake slither at his feet.

Lucifer pressed his lips against a knuckle like he knew he'd made a misstep.

"I'm a social creature. And maybe you have all figured it out, but looking at someone doesn't tell me anything about them. Not that you tell me anything about you, anyway." He stared contemplatively at the flames. "It's frustrating." He sighed and leaned back, tapping the front legs of the chair against the ground in time with the finger against his jaw. "And now you've ixnayed our quality time together, though between being here with you in person or in a dream, I can tell you which I prefer."

Sam didn't know if Lucifer was inviting a response, but he was giving one.

"If you think that's going to get me to let you out, then you're really not paying attention."

"Sam," Lucifer griped and the hand he was leaning on balled into a fist. "You tease."

"Excuse me?" Sam sputtered.

"You called to me and told me you would give me what I asked for, so I would come here alone. You led me on," Lucifer said with his brow furrowed in reproach. Then his expression softened imploringly. "But it doesn't have to be a lie."

"It's never going to happen."

"When whatever you and Gabriel cobbled together eventually comes apart, you won't have to go running back to your brother to beg him to forgive you," he said and quirked his lips. "He'll be begging."

"No," Sam said, forgetting himself. Lucifer didn't have him cornered. He couldn't talk that future into existing, however powerful he was. Sam took a few deep breaths. "You can blow smoke, but that's all it's ever going to be."

Lucifer rubbed at his mouth and chin, then sighed. Sam started on the next sigil in line, halfway down the longer wall opposite the door he had entered, that he thought of as the back wall.

"It's ten-thirty, Sam," he said when Sam had dipped the brush in the can to coat it. "You should hit the hay. You're getting a little sloppy."

Sam looked beside him, but the lines on the walls wavered in the light. He almost went back to check them one by one, but he'd trust himself before he gave Lucifer the benefit of the doubt.

Lucifer hadn't left the chair where he sat, legs crossed, giving Sam an expectant look like he was the overseer waiting for a, "Yes, sir."

Sam crossed the room, barely skirting the flames, and stopped by the sigil he'd broken earlier to repaint it before walking out.


	5. Chapter 5

"You know, I was taking a look around--and maybe you should have inverted the shield glyphs." Lucifer pivoted towards him. "Thoughts?"

Sam hadn't slept well. Lucifer's words made him stop and study the walls before he considered who the advice was coming from.

"I'll get right on that," Sam said and walked along the walls to his stopping point, trying not to be obvious about checking his previous work on his way past. Lucifer wouldn't get far enough to test these wards. He pulled his eyes away from the walls.

"I just want to help, Sam."

"Who? Yourself?" Sam huffed as he craned his head and squinted at the intricate lines he was painting above the first part of the symbol.

"And you."

"Because it's the same thing." He dipped his brush in the paint.

"Now you're getting it," Lucifer said, and it was a good mimic. He sounded genuinely happy, like an animal can scream in a human voice. Every hair on Sam's body stood on end.

"I don't think you get it," Sam said. He was repeating a sequence of sigils and was more focused on the conversation.

"Oh?"

"You keep offering the same things, and there's nothing you can give me that I want."

"I can give you anything," Lucifer insisted. Sam bared his teeth when his brush strayed. It wasn't the first time. He wiped his forehead free of the hair stuck to it and, after sizing up the mistake, he thickened the sigil's lines.

"Then stop the Apocalypse. Leave--"

"Leave you alone?" Lucifer finished. "I hear it now, the saying the same things over and over. It is really irritating."

"So, not anything."

"I am going to end the Apocalypse, with you. And then, after--" Lucifer shrugged, "Sure, I could give you some space." Sam shook his head. He'd expected Lucifer to at least try to tempt him.

He'd reached the end of the sequence and had nearly turned the corner.

"Sam, how far ahead have you thought this through?"

Sam ignored him and looked between the finished wall and the next and plotted the steps he'd need to keep the wards continuous. He was under greater pressure to plan. As he reached the end, any mistake he made could ruin the rest, like a long line of bloody dominoes.

"We won't be playing house here for the rest of your life," Lucifer continued. "But let's say you're right, and you win," said like his future victory was in heavy doubt, "then that's that?"

"Sounds good to me," Sam said.

Lucifer hummed shortly. It was the kind of know-it-all response Sam had made as a kid to dig at Dean. He'd been a little shit.

"What?" Sam snapped.

"I don't know, Sam, sounds like you've got it all worked out."

He set his teeth in the bit and kept working. He wouldn't react to Lucifer's capriciousness.

"But if you want to know what I think," he offered, like Sam knew he would. "I think you're overreacting."

Sam grunted instead of going with his first response.

"I think I've got a pretty good handle on just how fucked up this is," he said.

"You don't even have to do the hard part," Lucifer said. "Michael's been up there drilling the troops and taking notes while all of you find new and exciting ways to kill each other. And the Cage, meanwhile, doesn't even have a gym."

Sam scratched his thumbnail against an eyebrow with an incredulous smile. He couldn't argue with that.

"I didn't make the best first impression, I know," he continued and Sam stared. "I was ready to get it over with. A fight to the death with your big brother, not something you want to drag out." He watched Sam from the side of his eye. "And thanks for that, by the way." He faced him and Sam didn't expect the anger that breached his calm, like it had been waiting, fully formed, to be uncovered. Then he smiled and it slid out of sight.

"But of course, you would have a few reservations about being my vessel, after how you found out."

"All thanks to you," Sam said, holding the paintbrush loosely in his hand. Lucifer tilted his head graciously, accepting the blame.

"And I'm sure, if you'd had the choice, you would have wanted to be Michael's vessel. No, no," Lucifer interrupted when Sam opened his mouth. "I get it, it's fine. I'm not everyone's favorite. I get it."

"I don't know if you're trying to make me feel--sorry for you, or what," Sam said. "But Carthage, the Elysian--I'm not going to forget what you did."

"Yeah," Lucifer said and rubbed his fingers back and forth across his mouth. "You can't raise Death by organizing a charity run, Sam. Like calls to like." He meant that to apply to the two of them also, Sam knew, but he ignored the double entendre.

"You slaughtered them, like animals," Sam said.

"And that's something we can change," Lucifer said heatedly like he was moved by the injustice of it. Getting angry must have freed some nearby emotion. He made a circuit of his enclosure before he looked at Sam with newly shining eyes. Sam was caught up by the offer, which appealed to him solely from every one that Lucifer had made. Lucifer, however, didn't care about what Sam wanted beyond how he could use it to secure him as his vessel. He returned to the uncharismatic wall and its silent sigils.

"The rules that have to be followed are messy and cruel, but they apply to me the same as everyone else. God put them in place because He has His plan, and like everybody, I have my part that He wants me to play. But while I've heard the home team fanboys drone on and on about His big plan, not one of them has suggested that it can be rewritten. I'm saying that I can."

"But you need my help," Sam finished. He was painting sigils by rote. The brush was heavy as lead.

"Your help, Sam. Not your soul. Not your firstborn," Lucifer sighed. "Your help."

"My consent."

"Yeah, well, kind of have to get the ball rolling."

"No."

"No," Lucifer said flatly.

"No."

"Why?"

Sam was caught off guard by the question, because his reflexive answer wasn't going to work. He almost didn't answer. He had nearly reached the end of the second short wall, with most of one wall left to go. That much closer to the end. He imagined locking himself in that small white room. He paused.

"We could change it all. We can throw it all out and start over, or keep whatever you want. We could bring them all back, Sam," Lucifer said in a softly pleading voice. He wasn't just talking about Carthage anymore. "Why?"

He couldn't rearrange and edit the universe, or his life, like it was a rough draft. Sam didn't think that excuse would hold water with the being who had been backstage at its inception. He tried to throw Lucifer's offer right back in his face.

"It doesn't change that you killed them."

"It could. Time's just another rule."

That was a reminder of how Lucifer handled anything he didn't agree with. He could just make Sam forget. He didn't want to have that confirmed.

"I don't want you--in me," he forced out. There wasn't a less awkward way of saying it.

"How do you know? You've never tried, you might like it," Lucifer said with a smile curled around his words.

"I wouldn't like you shoving me out of my own body."

"What part of made for each other don't you understand? I'm not letting go of you, Sam."

He'd be trapped, staring at white walls forever.

"Six months," Sam shouted like he could still interrupt what Lucifer had said. He propped himself against the wall with the fist holding the paintbrush. "You said six months." He had more reasons to say no, but this one would work.

Lucifer had been walking around during their discussion, and Sam knew it because his footsteps went silent. Sam heard him sigh, and it was rough with frustration.

"Sam, look at me," he said evenly. Whatever Lucifer had been feeling was now neatly folded away.

Sam continued painting, but the silence nagged at him. He waited until the sigils met the corner to drop the brush in the can and turn around, though if the delay had a point, he wasn't sure what it was.

Lucifer didn't talk for a moment. His eyes moved over Sam like he was checking his own reflection. The glances were perfunctory, but Sam could feel the chill of his fingers even from inside a dream. The man Lucifer was inhabiting was probably dead, and Sam would be too, if Lucifer had his way. He couldn't decide if that was better than being a prisoner in his own body.

"You don't care what I did to those people in Carthage," he said with the barest motion of his lips.

Sam stepped forward to confront him.

"You can't say anything about what I--"

"I can. You're the kind of guy who could look past a few hundred murders if the cause is good enough. But you think I'm evil."

Sam didn't give his thoughts away. Lucifer continued.

"Ignoring the irony of you believing that I am irredeemable, I can see where you got the idea. There's not a lot of contribution to the contrary." Lucifer shrugged. "And, I mean, Prince of Lies? Father of Sin? You can't be called that in casual conversation and not be evil.

"But there are older evils than me. And they don't just go away if I do."

Sam had again failed to follow the turn in the conversation.

"Is that some kind of cryptic threat?" he asked.

"You just have to take a look at your own life. At every turn, it's headed for the worst. I'm telling you that I'm not as bad as it gets."

Sam laughed when he put it together.

"You're offering to help me."

"I am the reason a few of them are locked away," Lucifer said.

"You mean the ancient evils that are out there somewhere, waiting for their turn to take a whack at us?" Sam asked with a grin. Lucifer's smile was pitying.

"If I could keep you ignorant, I would." Lucifer folded his arms tightly across his chest.

"As tempting as that is, I think I'm going to pass," Sam said and surveyed the walls and the sigils spaced like rusted iron bars. His cut hand was already throbbing. He could make the final push later.

"You can't just lock us all away, Sam. A cage can only hold so much," Lucifer said, and Sam glanced away from him without thinking twice. Then his hand brushed against the rings in his pocket. He tried not to react, but he looked at him again. Lucifer was following the line of wards from beginning to end like he was reading them. More likely, he was looking for a weakness to exploit. Sam wouldn't read too much into what he'd said. He would forego as much worry as he could.

"And the Elysian."

Sam walked the few feet to the open door before he waited.

"I doubt you shed a tear for the pagans, but you know me and gods. We've never gotten along," he said. "But Gabriel--whatever you think of me, out of the two of us, he was always the better liar."

Sam closed the door behind him and looked down. He could see the metal bottom of the can glinting up at him as the paint pooled around its edge. At this rate, it'd be more blood than paint soon.

It was a thin line that he had made for himself. He had seen just how thin when Lucifer had pushed him to it explaining his reasons, which were all so far away from him, here. It was as thin as blood, but it was inviolable. It was all that was keeping him safe, and preserving everything he knew.

Lucifer wanted to take Sam's life in his hands and mold him like he was his own creation. And his justification was, at least he wasn't the worst.

Sam couldn't imagine worse, but he couldn't doubt it existed.

Alone, he sat on the couch and plunked the paint on the floor. He linked his hands behind his head and breathed. The light from the windows behind him crowded his image in the TV screen like a line of approaching fire. His own personal Hell. He closed his eyes.

He thought of Jessica, running out from under his umbrella and into the rain. She opened her mouth and drank it in while he whined about pollution, and she pulled away his cover. He let himself feel that rain now, and taste it, and hold her while they dripped and stuck together. When she slipped away, she was laughing.

Sam smiled. Lucifer hadn't taken her from him.

He hadn't taken Dean, who would never give in to Michael. Sam still had a choice.

And Cas had taught him what he needed to protect himself.

He looked up to stare at the wards he'd painted on the doors. He'd rushed them, but the lines were precise and sharp. He was proud of himself for keeping the Devil here for this long, and that wouldn't change.

He flicked on the TV to listen to Gabriel's familiar, comforting chatter.

"You're not going to starve or anything, so don't be dramatic. It wasn't easy setting this up, especially when the wards were finished--and it was all sort of last minute, you know, after you two spoilsports showed up and ruined everything." His smile turned lopsided. "But I think I covered the essentials. Food, water, entertainment." He spread his arms with a grin and leaned back with his hands behind his head. "You won't want to leave. But, for realsies, you won't be in here forever. At the rate he's been burning through his vessel, he won't be in it for much longer, and he's a lot less of a threat without one. I set up the wards with that in mind, so you just have to sit tight until then, and then you're free to go."

Sam heard a buzzing. He paused the video and it continued. It rang high and scraped across the bones in his ears like metal. He cleared his throat and stood up, trying to find its source, but the volume didn't change as he moved through the room. He pressed uselessly behind the corners of his jaw and yawned and gritted his teeth, chasing some relief. His fingers didn't muffle it, but he thought he heard words.

"He's stubborn--try to talk to him--"

He looked at the screen with wide eyes and Gabriel mouthed, "Don't listen." He stared but Gabriel didn't move. He couldn't have moved. It was the same frame.

He marched towards the doors and stumbled when he kicked the paint bucket. It didn't spill before he caught it, and it bounced in his hand as he went with his jaw clenched and his teeth bared at the jarring screech whipping through his skull.

In the warehouse, he came up short against the sudden silence. He could hear the blood rushing through his head. His gasp hurt his ears.

Lucifer was facing away, but he looked at him then.

Sam watched mutely as shapes arranged themselves on the walls from the fire's shadow, drifting like they were poised to fall. They rushed down towards Lucifer in one synchronized movement, like smoke and ash inhaled, and his wings tucked themselves away.

"Sam?" he inquired.

"What--?" Sam asked, fighting back the awe he felt, while he searched intently above Lucifer's head before his eyes dropped to him.

The shadows shifted again, but with their usual restlessness.

"I don't enjoy being trapped," Lucifer said and Sam looked as his lips to assure himself that the faint words had come from him. He was close to jumping out of his skin.

"What was that sound?" Sam finished.

He followed Lucifer's glance at the ceiling with faint dread.

"I was talking to myself," he said and shrugged a shoulder as their eyes met again.

"What were you saying?"

Lucifer was charmed by the question, and Sam quickly set him straight.

"You almost made my ears bleed."

"I'm just anxious, Sam. Wondering what you're thinking, where this is going."

Sam crept up to the circle while he took in every detail. It was unbroken. There was nothing in the circle besides Lucifer. No furniture, no debris at all, no markings. His gaze swept up Lucifer's form, but nothing had changed, including his concerned frown and the shaggy growth of beard that couldn't hide much of his raw, bleeding skin. The red flesh ran like his hand had after he'd held it over the flames. Sam swallowed against reemerging nausea.

"So, do you have an answer for me?" Lucifer cut in.

"Why?"

Lucifer rolled his eyes.

"I'm serious. You say you know what it's going to be when six months is up. What is this really about?" Sam asked.

Lucifer smiled beautifully, putting his vessel's laugh lines on full display.

"I am so glad Dean wasn't my vessel," he said.

"Tell me, Lucifer."

"What's your answer?" he repeated.

He thought of Jessica and Dean and Cas and let out a hard laugh.

"The same. It's the same. It will always be the same," Sam said. "No."

Lucifer's eyes slid from his, but he didn't look surprised, just disappointed.

"You're not just letting me down, Sam. You're letting them down," Lucifer said. Sam looked at him warily but it hadn't been any great leap to guess where his thoughts had been.

"I'm not," he said.

"You already have." Lucifer shook his head like he didn't want to say this. He turned sorrowful eyes on him. "And you'll do it again."

Sam's breath came short, and inexplicably his eyes burned. He controlled himself and laughed low in his throat, but it sounded strangled.

"I won't," he said sharply with more steel in his voice.

"They'll die."

"No."

"And it will be your fault."

"You won't touch any of them."

"I will," Lucifer said. "Because you will still say yes."

"I didn't, and the answer won't be any different tomorrow," Sam said angrily, but he was vindicated in his hatred for the archangel.

"I thought that you could change," Lucifer admitted as he turned away from him with his head bowed. "That you'd make the choice you weren't supposed to and prove me wrong. But you won't."

"Hey," he shouted and the angel looked over his shoulder. "I'm not the one who needs to change."

Lucifer snorted derisively and his lips stretched across his teeth.

"You sure, 'monster'?" Lucifer asked and Sam flinched. "'Abomination'?" He hadn't expected to hear the slurs that he'd suffered from his brother and Cas from the Devil.

"They sound like they really care," he continued when Sam couldn't recover enough to respond.

"You don't know anything about them," Sam rasped.

"You love them," Lucifer said, stepping further away before he faced him. Sam was right against the flames. "Maybe not Cas, which I can understand. He is one weird little dude.

"But you do. And it won't save them. It doesn't conquer all, or overcome death. It doesn't even matter. The plan's still on. And how we feel about that doesn't factor into it, because we care, but God doesn't, Sam. There is nothing loving about what He's done to us."

"All I've heard you do is whine about how you can't steal His plan and make it your own. How does that change anything?" Sam seethed.

Lucifer mouthed the words to himself and raked him with a furious glare. Sam held his ground as he advanced on him with loping strides.

"I guess I don't need to," he said from a foot away. Sam could see every sore on his ghoulish face. The firelight played in and around the holes in his skin, moving and glistening like maggots. "Almost everyone you know is dead. You've been doing my work for me, already."

"I will kill you," Sam spat.

"Why, do I remind you of someone? Jessica, maybe?" he asked and his lips parted sweetly. Sam swallowed bile.

"Shut up," he muttered. His mouth had gone numb.

"Blonde hair, blue eyes. We could be family. Actually," he put his hands in his pockets as he warmed up to the topic, "we are. Third cousins, fourth cousins. She would have made a better vessel than this one. She wasn't through living. She had spark. Fire." Lucifer's smile spread like a plague. "Such a shame. Gone too soon."

"Don't. You don't get to talk about her," he said. Jessica had been the first good in his life, _his_ life, not guided by Dean or John, but by his own decisions. And she had been proof that he was right in leaving his family and their world behind. But lying beside her in their bed, he hadn't even guessed that she was Lucifer. Her calm presence and certainty, like everything would go exactly how she wanted, had attracted him and reassured him. They were what repulsed him about Lucifer every time he saw him. Worse than what the Devil wanted from him was that he could have anything in common with someone he'd loved.

"She was just--part of the plan, Sam," Lucifer said and the viciousness evaporated. It had left him blank, and unwillingly Sam thought of Jessica pinned to the ceiling as he stared into her lifeless face. "Blood for blood."

Sam emptied the bucket on him.

Lucifer's face jerked to the side, and the contents sluiced down his cheek and onto his clothes. Sam's eyes darted to the empty can in his hand. The paintbrush had clattered away inside the circle.

Sam stepped back to get some distance from what he'd done, but he was locked in place. He jerked his arm, but it wouldn't move. His breaths came in shallow pants as Lucifer examined the hand that he was holding by the wrist in infinite, minute detail before meeting his eyes. A line of blood ran over the fold of his eyelid and spread through the thin membrane of saline, clouding the white until the blue shined against it. He didn't blink, and the stain set and dried.

Sam had crossed the line he had drawn, and Lucifer had him. The fire's heat was like a body pressed against him, and the muscles in his arm revolted when Lucifer lowered it towards the flames. Sweat ran down his face as freely as the blood streaking the Devil's. The pain would be terrible, but even brighter was the image of the hand around his warping like a cuff of softened metal, joining their flesh together until it poured free and the meat and gristle left clinging to them seared and stuck to the other's bones. He didn't want to see it, and he tried wildly to shake his thoughts loose from every obsessive detail, but he had seen what the human body could be stripped down to, and his wouldn't be any different. He couldn't escape.

When Lucifer released him, his momentum nearly pitched him backwards. The empty bucket clattered in an arc around its handle, but he didn't let go.

Lucifer stared at him without recognition, and in a rush, Sam felt ashamed. He had believed that Lucifer would take his revenge for locking him in here. He recognized how easy he had been to manipulate, but his fear overshadowed his anger at being played.

He fled, and Lucifer didn't call him back.


	6. Chapter 6

He stood in the middle of the room and looked around, at the walls to the left and right of him that were barely farther from each other than he was tall, and the ceiling that he could touch with his hand flat against it. They were faintly vibrating, like they were crumpling under the weight of the nothing pushing in on him from outside this discarded piece of reality.

The wall was smeared red when he moved his hand. His bandage was soaked. He unraveled it and blew out a breath when he found that he wasn't bleeding: it had caught the paint running over the rim of the bucket.

He opened the tap in the bathroom and ran his hands under the cold water, and slowly wound a new bandage around his cut. He was the one shaking.

He needed to go back. Lucifer couldn't be left alone, not if he was trying to get his answer weeks ahead of schedule. Sam didn't know where this plan was leading, and he wouldn't figure it out on his own without more to go on.

But he couldn't take a single step towards the doors.

He just needed to calm himself first. He walked over to the couch and leaned back into it, clopping his booted feet onto the coffee table. All of him felt strained past his limit, and his muscles ticked while he thought of being pulled into the circle with Lucifer and the agony that he had barely escaped. He wasn't relieved that Lucifer had let him go. The Devil would keep that fear and pain as a threat and warning and he would save it up until he could better use it further along.

Dwelling on the future wouldn't make it easier to face when it arrived. He locked the thoughts away and watched his hands as they slowly steadied.

He was asleep before he knew it, because when he woke up, he couldn't be sure that any time had passed. He didn't see his phone near him, and he looked for it under the table and then in the rest of the room. It comforted him even if it wasn't useful.

Each place that it wasn't made it harder to look in the next. It had stayed on the table since he'd last laid it down, and now it was gone. He gave up before he'd searched the entire apartment. He knew he wouldn't see it again.

Lucifer would know how long it had been. He was counting the seconds as they slipped through Sam's fingers. Feeling them pass but not knowing how quickly he was running out was terrifying. He wanted to make Lucifer tell him what he was planning. Being ignorant of what was going on in the next room was the bomb to the timer already ticking in his head. He ignored it and turned towards the kitchen without looking at the doors. He wouldn't let fear run him back and forth. Lucifer wouldn't dictate what he did anymore.

He turned on the sink to fill a glass and drank it. Watching the glass fill again, he was so wrapped up by a sudden thought that the water ran over, and he turned the knob, just enough so that the pour slowed to a trickle. He drank what he wanted from the glass and emptied the rest down the sink, then set it back under the faucet and stood there, entranced by the drops falling in steady, predictable intervals.

He counted them under his breath. It would work. He leaned on the counter, watching the drops add up, until he could tally how long it would take to fill. That would be two hours, give or take, that wouldn't be on his mind. He put the glass in a bowl as a buffer.

Gabriel's face shocked him when he walked back into the living room, but the TV must have been on since he'd left it. It was on the same frame, it had just slipped his mind. He thumbed the power button on the remote, but at the thought of the black screen and the blank walls without Gabriel to distract him, he pushed play instead and turned the volume low enough so he could hear the faucet drip.

After he made food, he found an unlabeled spray bottle of blue liquid in the corner cabinet, and with a shrug, he wiped down every surface in the apartment. Whether he wanted it or not, this space was what he had, so he made it his. He caught himself humming classic rock along to the dripping and smiled.

The glass filled and he'd emptied it three times before he'd internalized it. It would overflow while he slept, but keeping track of the time helped his waking hours pass, until he was eventually lulled to sleep.

He woke to a different tapping, irregular and close, and he listened while navigating out of unconsciousness. He blinked at a blurry coffee table, then up at the window. Someone was knocking. It was his brother, trying to wake him up, and he didn't look happy that Sam was still lying around. His knocking grew more insistent.

Sam pulled the cushion over his face and fell back to sleep to spite him.

The thought nipped at the edges of his peace like a hellhound. He tried to push it away, but when he grabbed a hold of it, he tensed in recognition and couldn't seem to breathe until he remembered the cushion he was holding over his face. He struggled to toss it away.

"Dean?" he blurted, but the windows were bright, and when his eyes adjusted, they were empty.

He sat up, hunched around his rabbiting heart against the piercing light. He closed his eyes and there it was: the tapping went on, uninterrupted, snickering at him.

He made a slow circuit around the coffee table towards the kitchen as he worked through the disturbed thought like a knot in a muscle. He stopped near the doors, but neither of them led outside, or to any help that he would accept--not the last time he'd opened them, not the next. His steps eventually echoed the dripping water as he went to check its progress.

The glass wasn't even a third of the way full. He'd been asleep for less than an hour.

Dreams moved at their own pace, but he had to have been asleep longer than that. He lifted the glass to check it for cracks, but the bowl beneath was dry. He set it down and watched it fill again for a few minutes, willing to accept that he had misjudged and that it wasn't a big deal that he felt like he had slept through an entire night but had those eight hours to look forward to instead.

He retreated to the shower, and when he got out, the water level in the glass hadn't moved.

When he could pull himself away from watching it fall, he still listened for every drop, sure that if he took his attention off of it for a minute then that time would be gone. Gabriel went through his spiel without him hearing a word.

Four glasses later, he sat on the couch, light shimmering at the edges of his vision, without a single thought about what he had done to pass the time. It was passing, though, as he dozed in and out. Blood plinked into a bucket. Meat dripped over a fire. A fist knocked lightly against a door, tap, tap, tap, and it shuddered and cringed at each rap until the walls wobbled outward from it like the arms of a tightly-woven web.

Sam staggered to his feet and tried to step out of the sucking grip of illusory sensation, but he had trouble prying himself from the ground. Pain sang through his clenched jaw and teeth like Lucifer's true voice in crescendos and scales, thrumming along with the water.

He looked down into the sink at himself staring up. The bowl that the cup was sitting in had blocked the drain and was underwater. The sink had filled halfway during, at most, a half-hour. His reflection and the room around him rippled as each drip pushed water out of the glass, and he twisted the knob of the faucet shut with his eyes closed against the destabilizing sight.

The sound continued behind him, and his nerves rived him like cracks in glass as he rushed to turn off the TV before Gabriel could drum his fingers again against the table.

Early morning stillness settled in the apartment and he was too afraid of losing the newfound normalcy to move. He stared at the TV and his indeterminate-number-of-days-old scruff and rumpled clothes on full monochrome display in the liquid surface like he'd come face-to-face with some skittish shapeshifter. That manic, cornered grin didn't look like his.

But it followed him into the kitchen and down the drain when he rinsed and dried the dishes, carefully pouring the water to where it disappeared out of sight and mind. It wasn't just Lucifer--this place was controlling him, and an impulse rose up in him to prove how futile his situation was.

He emptied the fridge onto the counter and shut it. It remained barren when he reopened it. He fought down his own objections and patiently disposed of everything down the sink, from condiments and jars of pickles to what looked like days worth of food leftover from meals he'd cooked, and he tossed the containers.

He laughed until he leaned helplessly against the wall when saw the same contents and not a bottle or carrot out of place stocked and arranged the exact way they had been before, since the day he'd arrived.

Today could still be that first day, for all he could tell.

The first glass jar he grabbed shattered against the wall, and he watched the drips trail towards the floor while he groped blindly at the spot where it had been.

He checked if he was searching in the right place and there it was on the shelf, in his hand.

The wall was clean.

He shoved the jar away from him and slammed the door before what he'd knocked over could fall out.

There wasn't any residue under his fingers when he stroked the paint. All he could see was the white wall inches from his face, like the padded lid of a coffin. Staring at it, what bothered him wasn't the comparison but that he'd made it before. The deja vu hummed at the back of his mind like an extra sense coming alive and he quickly smothered the feeling because he didn't trust it.

He moved the coffee table and stretched, swept up into his physical routine when he couldn't think. There was no time for him to structure, but he counted himself down while he went through the motions and washed the sweat from his face when he was done.

He picked up the knife in its boot sheathe from the bathroom counter to shave, but his eyes and hand told him that his beard was a lot shorter than he had expected. It was barely scruff. The edge of his knife was as clean as the gleaming sink and sharp enough to catch against the pad of his thumb, but he had apparently used it.

He kept testing the edge as he moved back to the couch, thinking over Gabriel's advice. He only needed to wait until Lucifer couldn't hold his vessel together any more. Gabriel hadn't given Sam any idea of when that might happen, or how he would know, and he was so out of step with the rest of the world, preserved in this dead place, that he might not feel it turning when it started again. But if he kept himself moving, he would be continuously moving closer to seeing the last of Lucifer.

He rammed the point of the knife into the coffee table, rooting his satisfaction in the small, misplaced act of violence. He rode the feeling out and sliced a few lines into the polish. Then the tally marks reminded him of how weak of a grasp he had on the days, so he indulged the childish impulse to carve his name, and moved on to meaningless symbols and then to ones that were on the walls in the next room.

He cut the last line of the wards he hadn't completed. He cut them again in a row above the first one with an eye for any weak points in the forms. He needed to see them in the context of the sequence that he had already painted, so he scratched those in. To get a complete picture, he realized he had to start from the beginning, so he could justify again every choice he had made in composing the protections. Except writing it in stacked lines didn't give him the right perspective. This room wasn't as large as the warehouse, but if he wrote smaller, he could fit it all on the walls.

He'd been aware on and off of the voice running alongside his thoughts, and he followed Gabriel's thread of conversation for a few seconds to figure out where he was in the video and match it to his own internal transcription.

"It's not so bad," Sam quoted.

"It's not so bad, Sam," Gabriel echoed. "You could be dead."

He wasn't certain those words came next, and he looked up at a black screen.

Behind the screen was a long, unbroken line of wards scrawled in blood.

On the table, the last symbol he had carved was crowded against the edge by the others like it was being pushed off. The entirety of the surface was engraved, and leaning back he couldn't pick out any individual line. He dropped the knife, tracing the motions back through his mind, but even there, each stroke blended into the next so nearly that they were inseparable. He covered his eyes, sorting through what he thought he knew and what he was seeing, until his grasp on his face was painful and he had to pull his fingers away before he broke skin.

There was blood on his bandaged hand, but he checked his nose before he thought of the cut on his palm.

He hadn't had a nosebleed since he'd had visions, and the last of those had been years ago. He rubbed his hands through his hair and braced his head between his arms at just the memory of the hideous pain they had caused, prying his skull apart and being delivered, molten, into his brain for him to witness. He'd thought he'd left them behind.

After the last vision, he had been chased by a relentless deja vu, reliving every second of every day for weeks as it happened. It had faded the longer he had gone without a premonition, until seeing the familiar in the face of a total stranger or a place he'd never visited was occasional enough to ignore and to tell himself that it was normal.

If this was normal, then he wouldn't feel that same dysphoria now, looking at the white walls of the room. He'd gotten used to these flashes being stripped of any identifying features, but this time the connection found him and he followed it.

It led him to another white room, where he sat on a white bed, and in the corner of his eye, however far he turned, Lucifer crouched in his periphery as a seeping shadow pinned up by the sharp, bright impression of eyes.

He ran from him towards the door, escaping further in to find out where he was, or would be.

Lucifer was waiting for him, in another room, leaning against a white wall.

Every room he ran through varied in small ways from the others, but Lucifer didn't move, watching with silent amusement cut into still frames by the passing walls so that Sam felt like he was running in place.

A few rooms further in, Sam spun and sprinted back through the door he'd just entered in a burst of frustration.

He was back on the couch, staring at his blood smeared on the walls with his hands on his face and the light scrape of his nails beneath his eyes. Either he would put them out or he would find a way that he wouldn't have to look at this room again.

Before he turned back to his knife he had a less drastic idea. He forgot the rest of the room as he dragged the blanket back towards the couch and used his knife instead to pin a corner of it above the windows. He stretched it as far across the light as it would reach and stabbed another knife from the kitchen into the other end, though he'd lost the details of when and how he'd grabbed it.

He sank onto his knees on the couch, praying reflexively that it would hold and then stifling his prayers under a flood of fear for who would be the first to hear them.

"You're not here," Sam breathed to himself with his head against the window, cold through the blanket. It wasn't therapeutic, but it's how he could cope until his life was recognizable again. "You're not--"

"Sam, I hate to see you like this."

The TV was off. The rest of the room was dark except for a stripe of light where the blanket fell short. It tumbled over the pale fabric of the couch and landed on the floor, across the toe of a boot.

The boot shifted forward, polished to a shine like it was giving off its own light, and he tracked its movement dumbly. His sanity was gone.

"What's with the black-out curtains? And no Nirvana? You need a bong and some black light posters minimum, or it's just depressing." The words were jaunty, for sounding like they were being ground up and spat out.

Sam knew a hand was reaching for the blanket when the air shifted against the hairs standing on his arms.

"No," he shouted, but he was leaning backwards over his side of the couch, nowhere near or willing enough to grope into the dark and snatch the hand away. But the room went still.

"I'm here. That's what you wanted, right?" Gabriel's face nudged into the light, revealing the hard points of his features. "I came back from the dead for you." His voice was tight and defensive, like Sam's curtness had stung him. Glinting metal protruded into the light at chest height, the hilt of a blade.

"No," Sam repeated, shaking his head and looking anywhere else. "You're dead."

"You really hope I am, don't you?" he asked and his face split into a red, sparkling smile. "Or this would all be for nothing. All of your moaning and angsting, for a laugh." And he chuckled.

"No. You were--Gabriel was better than that."

"Yeah, I was, wasn't I? I've still got it," Gabriel grunted as he pulled up onto the cushions on his knees and dragged himself along the back of the couch towards Sam. As he passed through the light, Sam shut his eyes. A hand landed clumsily on his chest, solid and warm, and pressed all of the air out of him. Another short laugh brushed his face, and Sam jerked his head away, gagging. He smelled like old blood.

"If you were really as grateful as you've been pretending to be, you would have listened to me, Sam. I know what I'm talking about. You try to write your own story, and you just get dragged screaming back into the main plot." Gabriel's hand was damp and sticking to his shirt. "And all of this running around and getting people killed, getting me killed, over one lousy line? Well, I'm going to coach you through it. Just say it." He balled Sam's shirt in his fist and shook it. " _Say it_."

"Get the fuck away from me," Sam said. He grabbed for leverage to throw Gabriel off and his fingers brushed the hem of the blanket.

"Don't make me feed you the script," Gabriel cackled, and the words fragmented by his labored breathing were almost unintelligible. There were suddenly fingers on Sam's face pulling at his lips and he panicked.

The makeshift curtain ripped with his full force pulling it from below and he swung out erratically with his arms, but the only weight on top of him was the fallen blanket.

In the gush of light, his shirt was as clean as when he'd put it on, where he'd expected to see a bloody hand print in the middle of his chest. He sagged back onto the couch, smacking his head against the arm, his breath sawing violently in and out.

The disturbed dust settled again while Sam stared back at the room as it seemed to wait for what he would do. His reason said it had been another nightmare and that he was safe. The undeniable sunlight brushing over the table's rough surface and absorbing into the putrefying blood on the walls said that this was still the nightmare. The walls and all the strangeness between them were so familiar that he could have been looking at the inside of his own skull. It would continue to warp and darken, slowly, without his notice, until he was no longer certain if he was in his body looking out or in the walls looking in.

He took the only exit open to him. He gathered up the paint bucket, now somehow fuller than it was before, and a rag that he could use in lieu of a brush. Maybe Lucifer had already triggered the trap, but it wasn't that unlikely hope that drove him forward. That future he had seen felt much closer the longer he stayed here, and he didn't want to meet it. He opened the door: the entire time he had shut himself away, he hadn't locked it.

Lucifer looked at him with the same callousness that he had those days, weeks, months ago, and seeing it was like Sam had still been running, and had just now stopped to look back.


	7. Chapter 7

He almost couldn't see the sigils in front of him through all of the reasons that he shouldn't be in here, which had started multiplying as soon as he had walked through the door. He was slow to dip the rag into the blood and begin, but he had already written the rest; he couldn't change the ending now.

"Did you get lonely, Sam?" Lucifer asked, and Sam jerked around to look at him. The angel hadn't moved from where he was standing in the center of the circle, staring up at the ceiling, and he stayed still while Sam watched. He couldn't be sure Lucifer had said anything or if the words had followed him in here.

"We're not doing this," Sam said under his breath. His drawing was clumsy. He'd seen that the brush wasn't where it had landed, and Lucifer was welcome to it, but painting with the rag slowed him down. The cut on his palm slashed that pace in half when it twinged and he switched hands. The wound hadn't healed, and he questioned how long he had been shut up in that room.

Sam checked on Lucifer again, like he was compelled to keep him in sight. He was barely out of the dark, where Gabriel had been crawling over him, and every space he couldn't see was a hand an inch from his skin. He pulled his gaze away, but each time he saw him it was longer before he felt the impulse to check, so he looked back. Lucifer's presence here had an explanation. He obeyed the rules as Sam understood them. He wasn't unknown.

What he had seen in the other room could also be rationalized. That the apartment stayed the same had unnerved him, but he'd seen through more impressive tricks from other monsters. Except he'd fallen for the trick before, when the same archangel had played it on him in a room in Florida on a long Tuesday morning.

He was paralyzed by the memory until he picked up his previous thought: his dreams. He knew why his dreams were bleeding into his waking hours. They had rarely been normal, but the number had dropped to none once Lucifer was out. And Dean--his nightmares were worse when he was alone. There had been nights after he and Dean had gone their separate ways, when he'd locked up the bar and trudged home to a single motel room, that had been stranger than anything this place had shown him.

His worries had a place. Most of them were behind a literal door, and the rest, he put back where they belonged. He'd taken what felt like his first breath since he'd walked in here when he finished the last symbol.

"Sam," Lucifer's voice seemed to boom from behind him, "I think we've dragged this on for long enough."

The room went black. Sam was running at the same moment that he realized Lucifer had broken free.

His hand bashed against the wall when he grabbed blindly for the knob. Closing the door had felt like the safer option when he'd walked in here. He yanked it open when his other hand collided with it and he was through it in one motion.

The lock refused to turn in his clumsy fingers, but he mastered it, and then he hit the floor like it had pulled him down. Bright flashes flickered through his thoughts, illuminating the symbols on the wall and Lucifer with his obscuring smile. It had been perfect. Sam had circled the room a dozen times in person, and hundreds in his memory, and the only flaw he'd found was that he was there, because he hadn't considered that Lucifer would pull him back before the flames had closed.

The door wasn't a defense. Nothing in this room would hold Lucifer back from reaching him. The sigils weren't strong enough, and even if he could fortify them, he'd left the paint behind. But his knife was lying on the table. He ran his thumb over his bandaged palm and tried to convince himself that the risk of ripping this place apart by banishing Lucifer was worth not having to see his loathsome face.

He listened at the door, tensed for the sudden explosion and fallout that was coming. But the rasping sound of scratching raised the flesh on his arms. The idea of Lucifer digging at the wood and pulling the door down piece by piece made him want to claw his own way out. He jerked his elbow against the door to interrupt the noise, and he gave it a few more blows while he got to his feet, but the grating sound didn't end. Sam hunched against the door with the watchful weight of the room at his back. The threat of Lucifer was more immediate.

"Stop," he said, and Lucifer stopped.

"What are you going to give me?" The question sounded like it was coming from right in front of him.

"Nothing," he breathed and waited in agony for the scratching to start again, but Lucifer called his bluff.

"Open the door, Sam."

"Open it yourself," he seethed.

"It wasn't a lie," Lucifer said in a conciliatory tone. "I'm not getting out of here without you."

Sam punched the door. He kicked it. He ripped the blanket completely off of the windows, revealing all of the wards on the walls, in his own precise writing and blood. They were worthless. He hadn't made a difference.

His gaze fell on the table and its insane scrawl, and he upended it. It knocked into the stand under the TV, which unbalanced. Deftly, Sam caught the television before it tipped and he righted it, and the close call banked his anger. Breaking, he could still do without thinking, and there would have been no fixing it.

He stared at the screen from his seat on the couch. It was blank, truly, but he could imagine Gabriel's indulgent expression as he waited out Sam's tantrum.

"Why?" he asked him quietly. Sam accepted that Gabriel had known much more than he'd said about what Sam was getting into. He would probably never know how much.

"It comes down to choice," Lucifer said from behind the door.

"And I made the wrong one," Sam said dully. "So, unless you're going to hurt me," he paused for a refutation of the words Lucifer had said in Carthage, but he was silent, "nothing's holding you here. Leave."

"That's not how it works, Sam. Everything wants to happen when it's supposed to. Every choice is made by all of the decisions that came before it."

"Shut up, Lucifer," he said as he pulled the table back to its feet, because he couldn't make the situation any worse by insulting him.

There was a soft thud against the door, but it didn't open.

"If you could see it, Sam."

Sam straightened the room. He rubbed at the sigils on the wall and only ground the blood deeper into the paint, but he couldn't distract himself from his fear of the isolating silence.

"What?" he asked. Maybe too low, when there was no response.

"The weight of all of that history. And how it balances right here, on this point." A loud exhalation punctuated the words. "But maybe then you wouldn't fight it either."

"Lucifer," Sam swore at his vagueness, but any threat he made wouldn't change that Lucifer had all of the power here.

"Hm?" like he was oblivious to their situation. Sam wasn't fool enough to believe that he wasn't following every word that was being said and plotting the implications.

Sam opened the door because it didn't serve a purpose anymore. Lucifer was standing with his back to him and looked over his shoulder. Sam missed the flames that had put an unspannable distance between them. But that distance had been an illusion.

"It's over," Sam said and Lucifer lounged against the doorway.

"Say it ain't so, Sam," he said in a mournful voice. Then he was suddenly as serious as he had ever been. "Or, say yes, now, and the future's a clean slate. We can put something better in its place."

"Have you ever made anything better?"

Lucifer stood straight, and so did Sam, so he could look down on the archangel, who stayed on his side of the door, arms folded.

"That's subjective. But I've tried," Lucifer said and the weary tone matched his face; Sam noticed the wrinkles around his eyes. "I'm trying. But you," Lucifer flicked a hand towards him.

"There's no comparison," Sam cut him off. "Whatever world you think you're building, you started it with blood and fear, and it'll end the same."

"I have to end the old, before I can make a new start," Lucifer said, his forehead furrowed like Sam's line of thought disturbed him. Then he put up a finger to correct himself. "Well, before we could make a new start, but that's not happening now. And, so you know, I would have done it, Sam."

Sam refused to ask the question.

"I would have given you everything. Just to see what you would have done with it."

Lucifer looked away when he stayed speechless.

"But we both know where this is going. You're determined to keep your eyes shut, whatever I say."

"Why would I listen to you?" Sam asked.

"I thought you would give Heaven a big 'fuck you,' even if it meant holding hands with the Devil," Lucifer said. "But I guess free will's just too much of a burden."

"You're trying to force me into being possessed," Sam said, but Lucifer didn't raise a brow at his own hypocrisy.

"Mm. I was right, this isn't going anywhere." It looked like an effort to drag himself from arguing with him. "You'll have nothing but time to regret not saying yes to me when you still had a choice," he said, standing back on his heels in the shadows, "after we get out of here. But for that to happen, I still need something, Sam."

"No."

"Then we're not leaving," Lucifer snapped and Sam's hand went to where his gun would be if he had it. "Give me something, freely, and I'll be on my way."

Sam could only think about what he couldn't give him, that one little word.

"Why?" he asked, but Lucifer wouldn't answer. "What? Like what?"

"Figure it out," Lucifer said with his face wiped of any nuance that Sam had taken for granted. He passed for human and then he was as featureless as light from one second to the next.

Sam glanced around at the room, and he could see everything that had happened here like it was replaying itself, and he thought of how many times he had been trapped in a dream with Lucifer. He dug his fingers into his cut palm until it hurt and he could feel blood slicking the bandage. He might have never left the room. Lucifer could still be locked in the warehouse, safely behind a circle of holy oil. He closed his eyes and focused on those thoughts, and when he opened them he and Lucifer were still there. The dissonance was too strong; he needed to know for sure, so he reached out.

Lucifer was cold as glass, and he warmed just as quickly. His hand moved up Sam's arm, like he was about to pull him through the flames again, and he was suddenly too real. Sam could pull away, but the last time he'd tried, Lucifer had held him in place. He wasn't as afraid now, tolerating his touch, as he would be if he knew he couldn't get away.

He stayed still as Lucifer moved close enough that he could feel his own breath against his face. It shuddered as Lucifer approached in infinitesimal advances, each pause long enough for a hundred denials, if Sam was present and aware of what was happening before he felt Lucifer's lips moving against his.

Lucifer's eyes were still open, so he clamped his own shut, and focused on the faint taste in his mouth instead of why he was tasting it. Then Lucifer's hand brushed down his side to his hip, and he jerked back, mortified by how much he had allowed. Lucifer let him go.

He didn't stop retreating until his back hit the closed door behind him, and the adrenaline finally started to pump. Lucifer stood just inside of the room, brushing a thumb against his own lips.

"I would have accepted blood," he said, and Sam felt his face flush at the interest that was still there as he looked at him. It could have been the same intensity as always, but the connotation never would be again.

Sam's thoughts had deserted him. He stared dumbly at Lucifer, who sighed and grabbed the doorframe to either side of him and leaned forward.

"I guess this is goodbye, Sam," Lucifer said, but he lingered for too long, fingers flexing against the wood of the frame as he looked at Sam like he hadn't completely decided to leave him. Sam started subtly working the bandage off of his bloody hand when the tension broke and Lucifer let out a long breath. "But not really. I'll see you in Detroit."

Sam ducked his head behind his arm when Lucifer lit up in the doorway like a flare. The pressure inside him released in a single, undeniable response, and he flung the door beside him open and ran through.

And he stopped short before he could pitch headfirst over the railing. He gaped at the world around him; the grass and sky were so vivid that tears sprang to his eyes, and he rubbed them clear to make sure that the view hadn't changed. He hadn't seen anything but those four walls for so long.

He staggered out onto the lawn of the apartment complex, and his state of mind must have been clear enough that a man walking by with his dog stopped short on the sidewalk. He was convinced of Sam's cover story a few words in, when he could finally string them together, and he eagerly offered his phone.

"Thank you," Sam said, accepting it with one hand as he scratched the dog around her neck. "But I've got someone coming. Thanks." He let the dog lick him a few more times, reluctant to give up the first welcome touch he'd had in weeks.

He walked a few steps away and, when he was in the right frame of mind, he dialed Dean.

"Yeah, hey," he said when his brother answered.

"I know. My phone's gone. Yeah.

"I'm in, ah, Montana. At some apartments outside of Missoula.

"I'm safe." Sam sighed. "Red Castle.

"I don't know. I just don't. Gabriel--yeah, maybe. I don't know, I can't get into it here.

"White Rock, I think.

"They shouldn't be that hard to find.

He opened his mouth, and waited for Dean to repeat himself.

"Two days?"

Sam stared at the apartment on the first floor. He hadn't closed the door, he had been so desperate to leave.

"Yeah. I'm here. No--I didn't find anything. I don't think we're going to get any more help from Gabriel.

"Yeah, we will.

"Okay.

"Alright. Bye."

He thanked the man again when he returned his phone and he walked away before he realized that the only direction he could go was towards the apartment. The concerned man had a lot of questions he didn't want to answer, which kept him moving, instead of standing out there aimlessly in the open until Dean and Cas showed up.

He didn't enter again until he looked in every corner of the room. It was empty, except that the marks he had made had stayed. Looking into it from the outside was like seeing someone else's madness. He wanted it to be. He didn't want to recognize it, but it had changed him. He would never forget this room. And he had only been here two days.

He forced himself to step inside, and felt ill, like he had walked over his own grave. He tried to look objectively at the destruction he had caused to an apartment that wasn't actually his, whatever his justification had been when he'd been locked inside, but at a glance he knew he couldn't salvage it. He gave up the distraction.

The door across from him was open, but it was dark. He laid a clammy hand on the doorframe, and jerked back when his fingers brushed against an unexpected sharpness. But Lucifer was gone: the air coming from the room was warm, so the darkness was harmless. He swept his hand up the wall inside and the lights clicked on. Scratched into the wood were symbols with the same flowing lines as the grain that lined up with where his wards had been on the warehouse walls. They were also illegible, but he could guess why they were stained red.

He had bit through the inside of his lip. He turned the lights off in the bedroom and leaned his head back against the wall in the main room and closed his eyes, but every explanation he came up with for the symbols ended the same: he had given Lucifer a way out. He didn't know how, but Lucifer could have broken the circle at any point and had waited until he had finished the wards to do it.

He sucked at his lower lip and the superficial pain on top of his humiliation reminded him of the kiss. He was relieved that he couldn't recall the act itself, but there was still a taste in his mouth. And when he licked at his lip, he identified it. It was his own blood, and the demon blood in it, and Lucifer had tasted the same.

He gagged thinking of how long he hadn't noticed it, and he rushed into the bathroom to spit in the sink and rinse out his mouth, but he couldn't get rid of it entirely. He examined himself like he could see the impurity in his waxy complexion or the red-webbed whites of his eyes. His arrogance in coming here alone could be traced back to a map of other weaknesses that riddled him, ready to bring him down at the slightest pressure. And Lucifer had seen them as clear as day.

He grabbed the side of the doorway and stood in it. He could see through the windows that the man and his dog had moved on. The room should have been fresher since the seal on it was broken, but dust swilled in the light, and the blood dried brown and flaking on the paint.

A glint in the late afternoon light caught his attention, and he prayed for the room to trap him here and swallow him.

The Horsemen's rings were lying in the exact center of the coffee table. He checked his pocket, though he knew it was empty.

He sat on the couch and picked them up. He hadn't had a chance. Lucifer had known all along.

What else did he know?

He slipped the rings into his pocket, and his hand bumped against the remote. Out of habit, he turned it on.

"You can't use the rings," Gabriel said. "Not while you're in here. And let me add a don't fucking do it, because I know you dodos won't pass up any opportunity to off yourselves if there's the slimmest chance that you think you're doing the world a favor." He looked Sam in the eyes and grinned as he tapped each finger against its opposite in a quick roll.

He could have dealt with Lucifer if he had used the rings like he had come here to do, but he had listened to Gabriel, who could be anywhere, laughing and congratulating himself for making his brother Sam's problem.

"Now, if you martyred yourself to sideline Lucifer because he is a colossal, dangling d-bag, or because you were going to, say, defend the honor of a beautiful woman, that would be one thing, but you won't, because you don't have the chops to pull it off."

He had tried to win back his life without sacrifice, but his life had been one sacrifice after another. He didn't want it back.

"So, recap, using the rings: not heroic, it certainly won't get you laid, and, ah, I probably should have mentioned this first, but they probably won't work."

He wanted Lucifer to regret knowing him. He wanted him to suffer.

"Don't do it, Sam."

He turned it off.


End file.
